first attended the Claddagh Toastmaster’s club in early 2022. Fast forward to three years later, I’ve now been elected as the club President for the 2025-2026 term.
I had never heard of Toastmasters until I came across it in a personal development book. It highly recommended as a space to improve yourself, particularly around public speaking. Having spent many years doing Model United Nations during my youth, public speaking was already rather up my street.
Over the last few years, my Toastmaster club has been a refuge in a sea of political chaos and radical personal shifts. It is one of the few in-person meetings with a regular schedule in my life.
Tag: #being
Creating my life’s impossible dream
As the year comes to a close, I’ve found myself returning to the bigger picture – my big ‘why’.
The point of dreams are to aim big, to stretch our thinking beyond what we currently think is possible. By going into the rational, we are losing our connection to what is beyond ‘realistic’.
One thing that’s really shifted my mindset on this is the idea of having a dream so big, that it would be literally impossible to achieve.
So what is my dream?
Where there is discomfort there is growth
Yesterday I had the authentic German experience.
I woke up after an overnight coach in Hamburg. I had a few hours to kill before the train arrived.
Well, it turns out I had longer than that. My train was delayed. At the beginning it said by 30 minutes. No big deal I thought. Until it got delayed again, by 20 minutes. And again. Eventually it came 80 minutes later.
The experience was a testing one for my level of zen.
Maybe we don’t actually need a purpose
On Monday, I facilitated a session for a local Toastmasters. The aim of it was to be motivational, and help people strive for their purpose. Or at least so I thought.
My instinct was that people could do with a bit of a pep-talk. A reminder that there is something bigger out there for them. This wasn’t necessarily bad, but it wasn’t actually what most people wanted.
It turns out, a lot of people are actually exhausted in being told that they need to chase their dreams and have a big purpose.
Daring to dream of a crazy, beautiful life
The more I talk to people, the more I’m struck at how every one of us have beautiful dreams for our lives.
Unfortunately, many of us get resigned to the idea that such ideas are simply the tale of fiction. After all, we could never ever achieve something as preposterous as that.
But we were born to dream. It wasn’t a mistake. Nor was it a cruel torturous method to dangle a carrot in front of our faces that we were never destined to reach.
Navigating the challenges of being different
I’ve known for a long time that I’m different.
Growing up in the UK from a Bangladeshi background, I was one of the few non-white faces within school.
But it was only until I got to my first office job that I first realised that my differences would provoke additional challenges. Before that, I naively thought that the workplace was a space that was genuinely open, and driven towards the most effective way of working.
With my recent autism diagnosis, I feel like I’m having this experience all over again
Moving on from the mediocrity of our living
‘Try having some fruit, that will give you some good vitamins’.
During my burnout period, I went basically into total hibernation mode. My eating was repetitive, easy to make food.
But in this one moment of eating an apple, my body suddenly felt a surge of energy. Rather than relying on a sugar boost from a fizzy drink or falling back on an energy drink, I was getting genuine, healthy nutrition.
None of this is exactly mind blowing. We all know eating fruit is generally good for us. Yet when I was stuck in a rut of mediocrity, I lost sight of what is genuinely nourishing.
Searching for where we belong in the world
This weekend, I went to a small group discussion with marginalised people from racialised backgrounds.
It’s really interesting being in these open spaces, delving on complex and emotive topics. I was fascinated by how someone was trying to explain the challenge of finding a group for people like them.
This brought up a conversation more broadly about a sense of belonging. This got me thinking about my own personal experience. It’s something I’ve struggled a lot with.
Managing the existential questioning after the holiday period
The last two weeks have been a lethargic period for many people. For me, I’m noticing that I’m probably more frazzled than I was before this ‘rest period’ started.
It is often the period of rest that allows issues to surface. When we are too busy, we don’t give space for the bigger questions in life to arise. For me, this has been a new layer of existential questioning of who I am.
There is no escaping the fear and confusion. It is part of the process. Running away from it does not make it go away, it just merely prolongs the experience.
Why we don’t need to be constantly improving ourselves
We’re nine days from Christmas, and I’m feeling pretty exhausted. Usually, I would start feeling reminiscent about what I had achieved around this time of year. But right now, I honestly don’t really feel like it. It just doesn’t seem very fun to reflect right now. I’ve had an ample share of emotional intensity for the last few months, so adding more doesn’t feel like a fun thing to do